by Anne Nesbet
Rodegar Malkin stood up. His head almost grazed the wooden beams of that back room, and his face was beginning to flush red.
“Your long-looked-for Girl with the Lourka finally appears, you madji fools, telling you it’s time to rise up and fight, and all you do is dither! As you wish. I can do business with a thousand other people, can’t I? Just because I’m giving you first crack at the best goods doesn’t mean anything much, I guess. Come along with me, Girl. We’ll leave them to bicker among themselves till the Surveyors nab them all.”
That was when something peculiar happened. The five people around the table all stood up, too, and somehow arranged themselves so that some of them were standing in between Linny and the magician, just as simply and instantly as that.
Linny felt alarmed. She did not trust or like Rodegar Malkin, true, but she didn’t know these people any better.
“Hey!” said the magician.
“Hey, yourself,” said the man with the beard. “We’re just saying, you don’t get to bluster off. We are thinking over your generous offer, and we will come to a decision about it soon enough.”
“We’re also thinking the Girl with the Lourka might be better off staying with us,” added another, darker-headed man.
The magician and the madji glared at each other, and Linny felt herself beginning to smoke, like linseed oil just before the test feather dips into it. She was not, she thought, another crate to be lugged around town or sold to the buyer with the most coin money or finally thrown at something and made to explode.
The feather went in; the feather was scorched!
She caught the merest flick of a cat’s tail, silvery golden, back in the dark places down the hall, and without thinking a single thought more, she ran right out of that room, somehow dodging the arms of all of those madji, somehow even dodging the grasp of the enormous (and bellowing) magician. Quick as fire, quick as scorching, she raced through the Death and Dollop and out onto the street beyond.
14
RACE TO THE RIVER
She couldn’t believe it at first, that she had managed to slip through all those angry people. Probably it had helped that she had had no idea she was about to bolt; she had just up and bolted. But this was no time to think real thoughts about anything. She hoisted the skirts of that dress safely away from the cobblestones, and she ran down the street as fast as she could go, turning off the main road once she was around a bend and out of sight of the tavern, and following what she sensed must be a slight slope downhill toward the river.
A Bridge House, near the river. That was where her Aunt Mina would be. A house near a bridge. Linny kept running.
When she paused to catch her breath, some minutes later, a faint hiss from the roof of a nearby house startled her. The Half-Cat was there, walking calmly along, all silver on this side. As soon as the cat noticed her staring at him (or so it seemed to Linny), it turned around and walked (all golden tabby) for a few paces the other way. And then it turned again. She was panting after all that running, but the Half-Cat didn’t have a whisker out of place.
“Are you following me, then?” she said to the cat. “Why?”
No answer from the cat; it picked its delicate way along the roof of the house and pretended not to notice Linny staring up at it. So she shrugged and kept running, while the Half-Cat shadowed her, up above.
Fifteen minutes later, a lane so narrow that Linny began to worry it would dead-end and become a trap instead changed its mind and spat her out into bright sun—on a street that ran right along the bright sparkling blue-green laciness of the river.
The Half-Cat leaped gracefully down from the last rooftop onto the balustrade and turned its odd face in her direction, almost as if saying, “See? See? Here it is!”
“Ah!” said Linny, and even though she was running, running, she breathed it all in, the world she saw now.
This was what she had tried to explain to Sayra, how it felt for her when she climbed a tree up high enough to see the world, or got to the top of a little ridge and could look out and see the rippling earth and stone everywhere around, or that time when she had found the outcropping of rock halfway up the Middle Woods, from which you could look down on the actual village of Lourka and see all of its rooftops and alleyways and laundry lines out back. It was like some part of her was always ravenously hungry for views, for overviews, for anything that gave her a taste of the lay of the land.
“Hungry?” Sayra had said, laughing. “Hungry, like your tummy rumbling, for a view?”
Oh, how she missed Sayra! That brought her back to herself. There were still angry madji and one very enormous magician coming after her. She trotted along the side of the river, gasping a little for breath and eyeing the world that had just come into view.
How strange the buildings looked, on the other side of the water! They were squarer and shinier, Linny noticed, almost as if they had been made with metal and glass, but why would you build a house out of metal and glass? Wouldn’t it be awfully sunny and hot in a house like that? So maybe she wasn’t seeing things properly. She would have to cross the river to get a better look at those houses.
That must be Angleside, over there, she realized with a start. The other half, the Plain half, of the Broken City. Over on this side of the river, meanwhile, in Bend, the streets were winding and chaotic, as if they belonged to some overgrown village. Linny could well imagine the people of such different places not liking each other overmuch.
Faster, faster! Every muscle in her legs was smoldering by now, and the stones of the city streets were beating bruises into the soles of her feet.
The river was quite wide in this part of the city, she saw, but ahead it narrowed some. And there, farther yet, was a great white structure that went right from one side of the water to the other: a bridge. A bridge!
She wrapped the cloak around herself so as to look like nobody in particular (tucking the lourka away under her arm, out of the way), and set off at a trot down the embankment toward the bridge. The river’s edge became busier the farther she went, and although her heart pounded a little as more and more people showed up on the streets or even brushed by her, she calmed down some once she realized that no one took notice of her. To them she was just a girl hurrying on some errand, not a fugitive from the madji. Not the Girl with the Lourka. It is a pleasant feeling, being anonymous in a city.
Linny slowed her trot to a walk, figuring that looking unhurried was as good as a disguise, and took note of everything: of the way the streets on the Bend side of the river arrived at the embankment from all sorts of odd directions, while way over there, on the other side of the river, what must be Angleside, the streets seemed to open up at quite regular intervals.
Here was an odd thing, however: across the street from her now was a girl, a few years older than Linny, with a fancy dress on and an instrument in her hand. What was that? Linny stared. A wooden box with threads running across the sound hole, rather than strings. What kind of sound would that make? But the girl was arm in arm with a friend and heading toward the bridge. The friend pointed—almost, but not quite, in Linny’s direction—and the two of them doubled over in laughter. They looked quite merry, really. Linny turned to see what they were pointing at and stopped in her tracks for a second.
Another girl, wearing something that looked like a reckless copy of Linny’s dress, made of whatever scraps she had found in the rag bag. But the oddest thing was, this girl also had an instrument in her hands—an actual instrument this time, though nothing like a real lourka, with strings that looked like maybe they were perhaps even capable of making a sound, if you plucked them with enough force.
Linny could feel the hair on the back of her neck spring to attention. Who were these girls?
And then a third brushed by Linny. Her dress was a better copy—the buttons were even of metal, though perhaps not quite of silver—but the “lourka” she wore on a cord around her neck was made of something that looked more like a pressed-paper hatbox tha
n anything else.
“Where are you going?” breathed Linny as the girl paused to hitch up her stockings.
“Taking the long way to the fair!” said the girl happily. “Today’s the day! My mother was a claimant once, said it’s huge fun—and they feed you free food all the days of the fair!”
Linny’s stomach rumbled immediately.
It had taken passing by a pretzel stand and then a soup merchant to inform poor Linny that she was hungry not just for views, but for a “little something,” as her father used to say in the middle of a long afternoon. But she had no coin money in her pockets, and it would be foolhardy indeed to start strumming on the poor lourka when she was trying not to be found! That thought—and all these girls around her in the crowd with their odd parodies of real instruments—made her tuck the lourka away even deeper under her cloak, and while she was at it, she tucked the thoughts of food away, too. You have to be tough, when you’ve just made a break for it.
As she got closer to the bridge, it became ever larger, shinier, and more splendid. It was built of white stone, a rising and falling swoop of a bridge, with four great pediments reaching down into the water. A pattern was carved into the arch: geometrical on the Angleside end, it became ever more recognizably wild looping vines by the time it reached the nearer bank of the river. It was a wide bridge, too, wide enough not only for people and carriages to hurry across it, but for bright awnings and tents to be pitched in the middle of it. It seemed to be a market as well as a bridge, and over it rippled a long bright banner: HAPPY CLAIMANTS’ DAY! Except that something peculiar appeared to be going on in that market. Men in gray, moving forward in a line across the bridge; people shaking their hands in the air; a man on a ladder grabbing at the rippling, bright fabric of the banner—what was that about?
And she didn’t see any house at all, not right here nearest the bridge. Perhaps on the other side?
Something furry wound itself through her ankles and made the strangest sound, a low warning squeak. The Half-Cat wanted her to keep moving, apparently. There was a small commotion over there on the street to the right—Linny caught a glimpse of yet another girl in a bright dress with a child’s pretend version of a lourka in her hands, this one being descended upon by a very large person, an enormous person, colorfully dressed. The magician!
Linny put her head down and slipped deeper into the crowd, grateful for the blandness of her cloak and for her own lack of height, and tried to move at the crowd’s own speed, keeping large bodies and pushcarts in between herself and the side of the street where she thought the magician must be moving along.
She flowed along with the crowd to the very foot of the bridge, and there the flowing crowd was brought up short and began to get tangled. A line of men in gray uniforms had formed about forty feet up the bridge, and behind them, other men, also in uniform, were putting together a makeshift fence out of metal grates. The crowd grumbled and surged, and the uniformed men barked orders at them and pointed at a large sign hanging on the central panel of that brand-new fence. It was hard for Linny to catch proper glimpses of the words on that sign, as the crowd thickened and became (from Linny’s perspective) a solid mass of shoulders.
She saw NOTICE! and CITIZENS OF BEND and something about an EMERGENCY DECREE and FALSE CLAIMANTS and DEATH. That was not very promising at all. She stood on tiptoes for one last look, and saw this: GIRLS WITH LOURKAS.
Her heart stopped for a second. Just stopped and froze and then began galloping forward again.
“What’s that mean?” she said to herself.
“Means crud for news!” said the person beside her. (Linny blushed to realize she must have spoken right out loud just now. Then she looked and saw . . . yet another girl, with pretty brown curls tumbling down her back, another dark-blue vest over a colorful skirt, another box with strings dangling at her side.) “Changing the rules like that, and on Claimants’ Day! And didn’t I have the devil’s own time putting this costume together? For nothing, I guess. Angleside killjoys! Well, may they fall right into their Plain Sea and be bored all to death!”
It wasn’t just Linny listening to her speech. A few of the people closest in that crowd hooted their approval; some laughed.
“Fair has to have a Girl, though, don’t it?” said someone a few feet away.
“Well, not me, not this time, it won’t have,” said the angry/pretty girl. Linny could see she was already trying to pull herself out of the tide of that crowd. “Not if they’re going to threaten to kill us, the vile griddlers. ‘Immediate sentence of death for all deemed impostors,’ it says right there. Well then, good-bye, I say.”
“Too bad!” and “Luck to you!” said a few voices, and a few others cursed the Surveyors with crunchy, furious words Linny had not heard before.
“And they’re checking papers on the bridge, those gray cowards!” said someone else. “What’re they frightened of, anyway? Girls with toy lourkas?”
There was the sound of someone spitting in disgust, which was not a sound Linny wanted to hear in a crowd as thick as this one. (Where was there for disgusted spit to go?)
“Someday she’ll come, our true Girl, and take charge, and they know it,” said another voice. “Maybe she’s already come, hmm? You know what the rumors are saying—that a girl showed up in the market square, who looked real as real. Scared, that’s what they are.”
Nervous laughter from here and there. And bobbing above the sea of people, not that far away anymore, Linny caught sight of the magician’s hat.
Well! She had no time to think what to do—she had an instrument that could be nothing other than a lourka hidden under her cloak, and no papers to show any Surveyors. So when the cat hissed from between her feet and then leaped pointedly through the crowd and toward the upstream side of the bridge, Linny blindly followed, making as little commotion as she could, though at least one woman yelled something unpleasant when Linny elbowed past her.
The entrance of the bridge was made grander by a pair of columns, rising pointlessly into the sky. Linny ducked behind the farther column, out of the way of those crowds again, and held her breath. Had the magician or the madji (because surely the madji must also be right out there somewhere) heard that woman’s yelp? Had they caught a glimpse of a smallish person in a cloak of no recognizable color slipping across the flow of people here? Linny stood very still for a moment and then realized that her cloak of no recognizable color must still be a darkish blot against the white stone, if any of those people chasing her had managed to get to this side of the bridge ahead of her. No, she’d better keep moving. The Half-Cat was already padding on, covering ground fast but without ever seeming to hurry.
And as she lifted her head for a moment, to see what lay ahead of her on the upstream side of the bridge, she had another of those moments where that hungry place inside her was suddenly fed by information, by the lay of the land, by the view. The river narrowed here and grew louder. The lower parts of the city had been quite flat, but here the water appeared around a kind of high corner and then tumbled down in a series of lively waterfalls. And up there ahead of her, across the narrow liveliness of this upper river, but before the actual bend in its course, was another bridge, a much smaller and stranger bridge, a bridge that was, in fact, a house, built above the water and stretching from one bank to another.
Linny’s heart did a little leap of recognition: Bridge House, Bend!
And that was when she heard the men’s voices, madji voices, from back by the huge stone bridge. They were loud, and they were breathless from running, and they were shouting, “There! There she is! Go! Grab that girl!”
Sometimes hiding is the right solution, and sometimes a girl just has to run like the wind and hope she’s faster than the angry people after her. Linny hitched up her skirts and ran.
15
THE BRIDGE HOUSE
Linny raced up the slope of the embankment as fast as she could manage, considering the fancy dress and the breakable lourka, slapping
in its sack against her side. It turns out a person can skitter along a sidewalk pretty quickly when she’s being chased by an enormous magician and a bunch of rebel fighters with an interest in grid-destroying weapons.
The Bridge House was very beautiful and peculiar, stretched as it was across the crashing, tumbling river, from one side to the other. Linny was running as hard as she could, so she caught only glimpses of the house’s windows looking out over the waterfalls, and only glimpses of the crooked roofline of the house, steep and shingled near the Bend side of the river, but ever boxier as it crossed toward the Angleside. Linny sprinted up the sloping riverside as fast as fast, hoping very much that this really was the Bridge House of which her mother had spoken, and that her Aunt Mina really lived there.
As Linny approached the thick gates that kept the street apart from the Bridge House’s front steps, the thought zipped briefly through her mind that this Auntie Mina had better not be out buying bread for dinner or what have you, because Linny really, really, really needed someone to be willing to open this house’s door and let her in. It was either that or face the angry madji. Not to mention the even angrier magician.
She slipped through the garden gates, slammed them closed and latched them shut, and then ran up the stairs to the Bridge House’s front door, as solid as a tree trunk and every inch of it carved with pictures of hills and rivers and trees and more hills—but she couldn’t look at it now. The madji were only a few seconds behind her. She gave the door a couple of desperate bangs with her fist.
“You, Linnet!” called the enormous magician from the other side of the fence. He was tall enough that his head showed above the top of the gate, and he started shaking the iron bars with his massive hands. The latch might hold, and then again it might not. “Come back, you fool! That’s the Tinkerman’s door. You can’t go in there!”